Thoughts

The idea I have concerns word frequency in band names compared to musical genre. I'd like to represent the commonalities of words in the names of bands, perhaps by referencing the "word clouds" often used in blogs ranking word frequency (http://wordle.net). I thought that I could represent a spectrum of modern musical genres that relate to each other and place band names in groups according to common words.

The only problem with this idea is that I'm not quite sure how to gather all the information; I'm continuing to look but wanted to post my idea now. I've been playing with lyrics databases (www.sing365.com is a good one) and I can at least get numbers of artists including certain words from this website.

I found this visualization that pertains to word commonalities and other factors in books of essay compilations. It's pretty but I'm still trying to decipher it:

http://www.munterbund.de/visualisierung_textaehnlichkeiten/essay.html

-Caryn

Rough Ideas

I'm trying to tie this project in with my thesis, which is developing a wayfinding system in Oakland that also contributes to building communities or social belonging. Oakland is a rich area for this because of the museums, schools, hospital, etc. Many diverse people live and visit here. So some of my initial thoughts included tracking museum visits, tracking ethnic and cultural changes in Oakland, tracking the amount of people in Pittsburgh yearly or seasonally (seeing as how many leave for summers), and tracking Pittsburgh's use of public transport, people walking and people driving.

I have not yet looked to see if there are visualizations for any of this or information to use. I'm thinking the last idea (public transport vs walking vs driving) would supply the best information and would be useful to my thesis because there are many ways to find your destination and it would be great to see what people in Pittsburgh use most and how that would play a role in my wayfinding design.

Any comments or suggestions?

– Kara

Wealth Disparity

Hi all,

I'm interested in the differences between the haves and the have nots. Wealth is power, and I'd like to visually show the disparity between the small "mass" of those who have a lot vs the "masses" who have little. So somehow, perhaps with sliders, I'd like to show relationships of how this has changed over time. Ideas for data could be things like executive salaries compared to min. wage, percentage of the country's wealth tied up in companies vs. the population, number of jobs held by an individual based on their income.

A couple of links I've found so far are:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-08-16-income-disparity_x.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7180618

There are a number of various charts and graphs that demonstrate this... I'd like to make them more visually arresting, or to be able to show the difference over time.

Possible direction for my content

Hi team,

I figured I would get our blog started with just a rough direction that I am thinking about. I would like to make visualizations regarding the growth of Wikipedia, and the evolution of particular articles. As probably the largest general wiki encyclopedia, I find it amazing how active and committed members (or "Wikipedians") are with editing and adding to the knowledge. Apparently just 0.07% of members are responsible for at least 50% of the editing.

Wikipedia has all sorts of statistics about their site usage (http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm) that will probably form the basis of my content. I'm not completely sure what specific directions I would take this, but does this sound like a good and feasible idea?

I know there are some Wikipedia visualizations out there that attempt to semantically show the structure and relationships of the articles (http://scimaps.org/maps/wikipedia/20080103/, http://abeautifulwww.com/2007/05/20/visualizing-the-power-struggle-in-wikipedia/, http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/clusterball/index.html). However, I didn't find any that show the growth of articles and how they change over time. That would be my primary focus. Do you guys know of any visualizations that exist that consider time?

Any thoughts, critiques, suggestions welcomed. :-D Thanks!

[EDIT]: I figured I should include my other idea for content, hoping to receive feedback on what would be more interesting between the two. So, I am also considering making visualizations tracking the life of US currency. This idea comes from the notion of the website http://www.wheresgeorge.com/, where people can enter the serial code of dollar bills, and you can see where that bill travels. I think it would be really interesting to see how long dollar bills are left in circulation from the time of printing before they are destroyed for being too worn out. I'm not sure where I could get data on that though (if you have an idea, let me know).

So, although I am interested in this currency idea, I am less confident on being able to get enough content. I already have a lot of data for the wikipedia idea. I am still thinking this out, so any thoughts are appreciated. [/EDIT]


-Allison

Welcome!

Based on what we discussed in class this evening, what are you proposing to use as content for the project? What problem(s) have you identified and why is the topic important? To whom is it important and in what context? What opportunities have you identified?